“[Charles Chaplin is] the only genius to come out of the movie industry” – George Bernard Shaw
Okay. So that’s a gross overstatement. As a performer, Chaplin was obviously incomparably talented; as a filmmaker, however, he was remarkably one-noted. His works are invariably episodic, self-indulgent revenge fantasies about working-class disillusionment, while his plots perpetually involve arbitrary romances with random chicks (i.e. weak attempts to give his stuff some heart). Every gesture is unabashedly in-your-face in its significance/symbolism, and most plot elements feel like careless contrivances employed only to allow Chaplin to display his remarkable plethora of talents. To be fair, Chaplin does have mad skillz (In The Circus, he does some particularly crazy shit with a tightrope) as a performer – but an impressive lead actor does not make a brilliant film – a point I’ve probably made with my previous review of Monster. To make things worse, years of repeated plagiarism have worn the farce genre thin, and the originality that Chaplin was once known for no longer applies to much of his work. Thankfully, the-powers-that-be (I’m an occasional advocate for a secular form of spirituality – when I’m not smoking pot) always have a way of coaxing great things from great people, and advents in film/sound technology cemented Chaplin’s place among film greats.
By 1930, ‘talkies’ (or sound films) were already ubiquitous, and Chaplin became increasingly convinced that his brand of silent film would be rendered obsolete. It was with this resigned bitterness, this semi-hopeful, semi-fearful emotional convolution, this intoxicating uncertainty, that his best films (namely The Circus, City Lights and Modern Times) were made. While his previous films were purely light-hearted camp fodder, his new films were progressively self-aware, self-referential, and even bitter. With City Lights, Chaplin crafts a film that is equal parts farce and heart, equal parts superficial laughter and tentative ambiguity.
As mentioned earlier, his earlier films seem to employ romance as a convenient plot device, and the love between The Tramp and Random Girl often comes across as disingenuous, haphazard and convenient. Here, the romance is so pure and so fucking adorable that it’s impossible not to be drawn into its huggable awesomeness. When The Tramp asks the Blind Girl “May I see you home again?”, one is immediately brought back into a time before this exhausting era of sexualized romance and armchair psychology – when love was about holding hands and staring wordlessly into each other’s faces, when people didn’t have to overanalyze and rationalize every fucking thing and when life was just generally less crowded and delineating. When The Tramp is released from prison and serendipitously finds his newly un-blinded Florist Girl, his eyes light up instantly with genuine joy. In any modern film, romantic gestures are often derided for their cringe-inducing disengagement from reality; here, romantic clichés find new significance, and feel refreshing in their stark bareness. At the risk of my purist cred, I’ll admit that I am actually very much reminded of Lars and the Real Girl (I AM SERIOUSLY NOT REFERENCING GOSLING MOVIES ON PURPOSE TYVM), a film that is over-the-top corny, but that is so dedicated to its own utopian implausibility that it inadvertently becomes a heart-rending lament about the loveless, soulless hole our world has become. City Lights is, ultimately, a story about a man who thinks so little of himself and so much of some random blind girl, that he is willing to do anything to secure her happiness – without asking for anything in return. Yeah. I know. SWEETNESS OVERLOAD. *sobbing* But being impossibly cute and mind-numbingly idealistic only makes for a fantastic guilty pleasure; films with genuine artistic merit are the products of so much more.
As with his best films, City Lights manages to retain Chaplin’s campy sense of humor while casually drawing attention to broader thematic concerns both socio-political and personal in nature. OH. And he does so with such effortless finesse, he makes the cult of Groundhog Day sycophants look like fools. Let’s take a moment to really appreciate/translate just a few of Chaplin’s throwaway jokes:
1) Replace mayor’s speech with pompous-sounding gibberish (FUCK YOU TALKIES)
2) Everyone leaps to attention once Star-Spangled Banner (FUCK YOU MINDLESS SUPPORTERS OF THE USA-FOUNDED LEAGUE OF NATIONS)
3) The Tramp pretentiously admires chicken trinket while ogling at a naked female body (FUCK YOU PRETENTIOUS, PERVERSE ART-LOVERS)
4) The Millionaire’s self-important butler is unsympathetic towards The Tramp, but becomes mechanistically welcoming upon the request of his master (FUCK YOU CLASS DELINEATIONS)
5) The Tramp hides behind the referee as he throws some well-timed punches at a trained boxer (FUCK YOU CENSORSHIP)
But the jokes aren’t all that contribute towards the broader web of rich symbolism that envelopes the film; Chaplin’s characteristic employment of sympathy ploys here too find a more complex meaning. Notice how he immediately tries to run away from the Flower Girl because he (partially, anyway) doesn’t believe himself worthy of love. Notice how he bows his head in stoic resignation when random kids make him the unwitting target of their cruel pranks. The Flower Girl here no longer plays The Tramp’s quintessential female counterpart, but instead acts as a stand-in for an audience trying to negotiate its appreciation for silent cinema in the advent of the talkie. The kids here no longer represent the cruel social forces that repress the lower-classes, but instead are stand-ins for Chaplin’s personal demons and fears. Chaplin, helpless and uncertain of his relevance to a world swept by change, can do nothing but walk away, defeated. This new dimension of meaning confers on City Lights the very substance that his previous films lacked, and bestows upon it a strange sense of self-awareness that was revolutionary for its time. Actually, 80 odd years into the future, Chaplin’s idiosyncratic, hybridized brand of farce, metafilm and romance is still untouchable; no less than a film great can pull this shit off and still make it a poignant, entertaining ride.
More than any other film of its time, City Lights embodies the magic of silent cinema. In its ending sequence, there are two intertitle sequences: “You can see now?” and “Yes, I can see”. If these lines were to be said out loud, Chaplin’s beautiful illusion would immediately be shattered, because dialogue is necessarily grounded in reality. Written text, however, is not. That is to say, the audience is free to read and understand the words on the screen without realizing how corny it would sound if said out loud. When Chaplin bites his nails and bursts into a smile, we know immediately what he is thinking. There is no explanation, no word uttered, because any explanation would be unnecessary and any word would spoil the sheer beauty of the scene. In a single smile, Chaplin conveys his hope for a world that continues to embrace him, for a world unbent on brute progress, for a world of simplicity and for a world of love. Talkies spend monologues after monologues on these things, and still say less than what Chaplin doesn’t need words to say in 5 seconds. Now that’s something great.
Personally, my favourite Chaplin film is The Circus, because it is a magnificent, self-referential compilation of Chaplinian conventions. That is, it simultaneously revels in and mocks its own absurdity, savors its own self-indulgence and casually acknowledges its own irrelevance. It is a breathtaking exercise in self-awareness and artistic self-reflexivity. City Lights is not nearly as self-interrogative as The Circus, but it has so much more heart – and as such it should be lauded as Chaplin’s finest cinematic achievement.
So it’s episodic. So it’s slapstick. I don’t care. And if you’ve watched the ending of City Lights, I don’t understand why you would either.
KevinScale Rating: 5/5
therein, Therin. 